This thesis consists of two essays on economic fluctuations. The first essay (Chapter 2) explores the role of expectations in economic fluctuations. It does so within a cashless, monetary, and competitive economy featuring producers and consumers/workers with asymmetric information. Only workers observe current productivity and hence they perfectly anticipate prices, whereas all agents observe a noisy signal about long-run productivity. Information asymmetries imply that monetary policy and consumers' expectations have real effects. Non-fundamental, purely expectational shocks are conventionally thought of as demand shocks. While this remains a possibility, expectational shocks can also have the characteristics of supply shocks: if positive, they increase output and employment, and lower in flation. Whether expectational shocks manifest themselves as demand or supply shocks depends on the monetary policy pursued. Forward-looking policies generate multiple equilibria in which the role of consumers' expectations is arbitrary. Optimal policies restore the complete information equilibrium. They do so by manipulating prices so that producers correctly anticipate their revenue despite their uncertainty about current productivity. I design targets for forward-looking interest-rate rules which restore the complete information equilibrium for any policy parameters. In flation stabilization per se is typically suboptimal as it can at best eliminate uncertainty arising through prices. This offers a motivation for the Dual Mandate of central banks. The second essay (Chapter 3) shows that implementation cycles, introduced in Shleifer (1986) , are possible in the presence of capital and the absence of borrowing constraints. In a two-sector economy, patents on cost-saving ideas which take the form of investment-specific technological change arrive exogenously at a sequential, perfectly smooth rate: in odd-numbered periods, they reach a firm producing capital of type 1 and, in the even-numbered ones, a firm producing capital of type 2 . Firms can make profits out of these once. While the immediate appropriation (henceforth, "implementation") of patents is always a possibility, for accordingly formed expectations, firms can alternatively implement their patents simultaneously. This is because investment-specific technological change naturally introduces a one-period discrepancy between the time firms implement their patents and the time they receive revenue out of them. The implementation of a patent implies a sharp fall in investment which, in turn, causes a boom in current consumption. As a result, the consumption boom takes place before the wealth boom. This not only eliminates the need to smooth consumption away from the wealth boom to the period before it as conjectured, but, further, it implies that the interest rate paid when revenue is realized -and wealth expands- falls. Consequently, present discounted profits rise and implementation cycles can become a possibility. In a policy extension, I show that prolonging patent rights to two periods rules out "implementation cycles" and may lead to a welfare improvement.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:bl.uk/oai:ethos.bl.uk:582199 |
| Date | January 2012 |
| Creators | Rousakis, Michail |
| Publisher | University of Warwick |
| Source Sets | Ethos UK |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
| Source | http://wrap.warwick.ac.uk/55269/ |
Page generated in 0.0022 seconds